Minimum Specs for an HTPC

[Joerg]

Well my faithful modded xbox died last week and Ive been wanting to replace it with something anyways. I am a college student and not exactly made of money so the cheapest options would be best.

Currently I have these spare parts lying around.

Athlon K7 1GHz old
Athlon XP 2100+ tbred core
Epox Nforce 2 Board
Gateway socket 462 board sdram slots
2x128 Megs of DDR 400
256 Megs Sdram Pc133
300watt PSU
Homemade HTPC case
40gig harddrive
DVD rom
CDRW
2 Nic Cards
MSI tv tuner card
RIVA TNT agp graphics card with svid out.

Yeah i know its a sad lineup, but its all i have, and probably all i can afford.

I have used Media Portal before and found it to be kind of slow and unstable. Also i have alot of video files in bin cue files that to my knowledge cannot be opened in media portal.

So here is what i need to know. Is the hardware i have going to be hopeless, or do you think there is a chance that i can a working HTPC setup out of that?

I am almost wondering if just replacing my xbox would be a better deal. The xbox never gave me a single issue and seems to play every file i can throw at it, the only draw back was the absence of a tvtuner card.

 

[3chordcharlie]

You can get a working htpc out of what you have. To get one that works fairly well, you'll want some more ram, and a second, larger hard drive. I would consider external firewire for this drive so you can get SATA, but that's more of a detail thing. You can get up and running with what you have.

Your 2100+ should be fine for recording shows, but not so hot for actual 'PVR'ing, unless you can get some more out of it with an OC; even then it won't be butter-smooth like a set-top box.

As far as a media box, that setup should be fine, though again, more ram will help a whole lot.

 

[Joerg]

Thats kind of what i was affraid of. As far as HD space is concerned, I know 40gigs isnt much for a DVR box, but lets just say 90% of my media comes from the net anyways and I have just under a terra byte on my desktop which will be networked. The network is just a standard 10/100 BaseT do you think that will be a bottle neck? The reason i ask is becuase i have ran media portal on the machine in question but the thing is slower than crap and at the moment i cant afford more ram. Would i be better off running win 2000 maybe? Or does MP even run on win 2000?

 

[3chordcharlie]

I don't know about MP and w2k, but you will get much better overall performance from w2k if you are limited to 256MB of ram.

I ran a pretty similar setup to what you had (1.4ghz AXP and a leadtech tuner-card) a few years ago, with 256MB and w2k. It gave acceptable recording quality in MPEG2, but was not capable of PVR duties.

I don't use it for TV anymore, since I picked up a DVD recorder for about $80, but that system currently lives on as an XP1800 with a gig of ram and winXP, and records TV pretty much perfectly.

 

[dfuze]

Don't waste that xbox shell! I was able to put similar parts into a broken xbox and turned it into a pvr so I didn't have to waste money with the cable company. I put a matx motherboard (socket a), a 2500+ mobile cpu, 2 x 512mb pc3200, 30gb laptop hard drive, 6200 video card (low profile), and an ati tvwonder ve inside. Tight fit, but it all got in there. Combined with a wireless usb adapter, keyboard, and mouse, I'm very happy with it.

 

[SpeedEng66]

it really depends on what you will be doing with your htpc.

a tv tuner card with mpeg 2 hardware decoder on board would be better for pvr-ing
but we all have to make due to what we have layin around

as for video cards
I thought any video card would be fine just to output a dvd movie boy was I wrong.
I was using a ti4600 but I switched over to a gf 6200 and it made a big difference on cpu cycle's (with use of purevideo)
btw are you using svideo to display on a tv? or..

and what kind of display/tv are you using?

 

[Joerg]

I am using a normal analogue CRT set 32," it has has svid input. I wish i had more memory and a fast gfx card but i already went out spent like 30 dollars on an old gateway system to get the vid card and power supply.

 

[Raduque]

I don't know much about media portal, I'm an MCE user.

Use the XP and the nForce2, trade/sell everything away so you can get 512mb, because 256 would be a big bottleneck. Your network however, won't, I've been able to stream high bitrate HD files over 54g wifi with no lag, so network storage will work fine for ya.

 

[silverpig]

Throw knoppmyth on that hardware and you'll be fine.

 

[Joerg]

Ive been debating just trying a linux install and running myth, but i dont have any experience with linux and im a bit iffy on the steps needed to network the linux box to the rest of my systems. I just use samba normally.

 

[cbuchach]

I just put together a Windows Media Cetner Box with an Athlon 1200, 512 or RAM, an ATI 9550 video card and a new ATI TV Wonder 550. This combo works great. If you want TV, getting a hardware MPEG2 card is the way to go.